The night had been long and tiresome, filled with stupidities of varying faces and degrees, but now the sun was up, full up, and she was free again. The heat and glare of the day was rising as she returned to the place of her comfort.
Wearily she entered the bedroom, her place, her refuge, the scene of her escape and of her surrender. She crossed the floor, discarding the unnecessary with each step - ugly comfortable shoes abandoned by the door, the hated pants two steps beyond, the even more loathsome logo-emblazoned shirt a step beyond that. By the bed she shrugged off the outrageously feminine bits of satin and lace she wore as a physical reminder to herself through the long humiliating nights that she was not the uniform she wore, she was not a mindless, gender-irrelevant, interchangeable part of the corporation's machine.
She reached up and pulled the larger of the two hanging crystal teardrops to set the ceiling fan rotating at its highest speed. The shadows of the leaves outside her window danced across the soft white expanse of lace trimmed cotton as she drew back the quilt and slipped into the sundappled sheets on her side of the bed. Still her side of the bed it was, even after all this time. No matter that it was the farther side from the door, no matter that she did not sleep still, for even in the depths of dreams she hardly ever strayed any farther across the invisible line of demarcation than to retrieve the extra pillow.
The sunlight playing across her closing lids, the ebb and flow of barking, the endless traffic beyond the windows - none of these disturbed her. She had the essentials, the big fan whirring above and the yielding pillow crushed in her embrace. Sleep flowed over her like a drug.
It was not much of a cry, the little mewling whimper that awakened her, but it was enough. She covered the two steps to the cradle almost before she opened her eyes. It was instinct it seemed, an instinct that only a short while ago she would not have believed existed in her. She believed herself to be a creature of reason, of thought, maybe even too much thought. But here she was, instantly awakened from a deep sleep in the dead of night, reaching for the infant, murmurring the singsong syllables of a language which he had created in her. He was hungry, she knew it as much from the gentle ache in her breasts as from his tiny waving fists and his fretful keening.
Moving to the rocker, she glanced at the sleeping form in the big bed. Undisturbed, he slumbered on, oblivious to his son's hunger. It did not matter, anyway. He could not feed the baby. It was only right that he go on sleeping. She felt sorry for him that he was not a part of this.
Opening the tie of her thin cotton gown, she slipped the baby against her bared skin. How practiced she had become at this in so short a time. She had expected to hate these nightly feedings, but, much to her own surprise, she found herself content. It all still amazed her, the very rightness of the baby in her arms, the perfection of design which matched the length of her forearm to the length of his tiny body, the roundness of his head to the palm in which she cradled it, his little bunched up legs nestled in the hollow just below her left breast. The incredibly small creature she held in her arms was more a part of her than anything else could ever be. If she had believed in a god this would have been her proof.
The baby in her arms was a miniature of the man in her bed; their fine golden hair, their fair skin, their light grey eyes. His father's eyes they were, no doubt, but she knew with a faith too simple too express that her son's eyes, so very like his father's, would be also be different. Not for this child the clouds that had roiled behind his father's greys. Such terrible storms there had been behind those older eyes, storms in a sea unfathomable to her. Such dire battles he had fought, the why she never truly knew, until, after years of struggle, he had finally prevailed. The storms had slowly disappeared until now those struggles were but mercifully fading memories, each triumph a tribute to the man he now was, to the man he had become.
She rocked contentedly, humming a wordless tune, accompanied by the soft suckling sound of the baby at her breast and the slow audible breath of the man asleep in the moonsplashed bed. In this room was her world, these two its center. Later she knew there would be another - a girl perhaps - who would have her deep blues and her dark hair, and after that, perhaps another. There were good things ahead for them all. There was love and hope enough to sustain them. This was her faith and it was strong and true.
With her free hand she carressed the nursing baby, her fingers slipping over fine wisps of sweet-smelling hair, the feather soft skin, the tiny curving ear. Long after he had sated himself and fallen back to sleep, she sat, humming and rocking, the warm sleeping infant almost as near to her now as he had been all those months before his birth. She drifted off, the baby cradled safely in her arms, her own body nestled comfortably in the deep curved-back rocker.
In the dusk-darkening room beneath the turning fan, she clutched spasmodically, closing her arms about the yielding bundle. The baby! She had almost dropped
the ... Reality crashed in around her. There was no baby. It was as though some force had reached inside to pull the beating heart from her. There had never been a baby. There would never be a baby. Gone, just like that, all of it, gone - her life, her future, her baby, him. She could hardly breathe for the great sucking emptiness she felt. She did not note the time passing as she stared over the edge of the bed at the trail of clothing lying in puddles on the floor. Moments passed in a fragile equilibrium that could not hold for long. Like any vacuum, the hole inside her demanded to be filled, for such is the nature of vacuums. The hole did not care what would fill it, anything would do, anything at all, even anger.
With a bitter wordless cry, she flung the pillow violently against the window, wishing it would break.
